These books were selected by the staff of the New York Public Library for an exhibition in honor of the library’s Centennial in 1995. They are grouped in broad subject categories. The library published an extensively annotated version of the list in book form, called The New York Public Library’s Books of the century, edited by Elizabeth Diefendorf, and published by Oxford University Press in 1996.

LANDMARKS OF MODERN LITERATURE

The three sisters by Anton Chekhov (1901)

Remembrance of things past by Marcel Proust (1913-1927)

Tender buttons by Gertrude Stein (1914)

The metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)

Renascence and other poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917)

The wild swans at Coole by William Butler Yeats (1917)

Six characters in search of an author by Luigi Pirandello (1921)

The wasteland by T.S. Eliot (1922)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

The magic mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

The great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)

Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca (1928)

Native son by Richard Wright (1940)

The portable Faulkner by William Faulkner (1946)

The age of anxiety : a baroque eclogue by W.H. Auden (1947)

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952)

Invisible man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (1944 and 1956)

On the road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)

Portnoy’s complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

NATURE’S REALM

The life of the bee by Maurice Maeterlinck (1901)

Treatise on radioactivity by Marie Curie (1910)

The meaning of relativity by Albert Einstein (1922)

A field guide to the birds by Roger Tory Peterson (1934)

A Sand County almanac by Aldo Leopold (1949)

King Solomon’s ring : new light on animal ways by Konrad Lorenz (1949)

Silent spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

Smoking and health by the U.S. Surgeon General (1964)

The double helix by James Watson (1968)

The diversity of life by Edward O. Wilson (1992)

PROTEST AND PROGRESS

The battle with the slum by Jacob Riis (1902)

The souls of black folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)

The jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906)

Twenty years at Hull House by Jane Addams (1910)

The house on Henry Street by Lillian Wald (1915)

The autobiography of Lincoln Steffens by Lincoln Steffens (1931)

U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos (1937)

The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

Let us now praise famous men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)

Strange fruit by Lillian Smith (1944)

Growing up absurd by Paul Goodman (1960)

The fire next time by James Baldwin (1963)

The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (1965)

And the band played on by Randy Shilts (1987)

There are no children here by Alex Kotlowitz (1991)

COLONIALISM AND ITS AFTERMATH

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900)

Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

Satyagraha (Non-violent resistance) by Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

A passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)

The stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

United Nations charter by the United Nations (1945)

Cry, the beloved country by Alan Paton (1948)

The family of man Exhibition by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.

Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

The wretched of the earth by Frantz Fanon (1961)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

Season of migration to the north by Tayeb El-Salih (1969)

Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul (1975)

The bride price by Buchi Emecheta (1976)

Cesarz (The emperor) by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1978)

I, Rigoberta Menchu by Rigoberta Menchu (1983)

The lover by Marguerite Duras (1984)

MIND AND SPIRIT

Suicide : a study in sociology by Emile Durkheim (1897)

The interpretation of dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)

Studies in the psychology of sex by Havelock Ellis (1901-1928)

The varieties of religious experience by William James (1902)

The prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)

Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell (1927)

Coming of age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928)

Being and nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

The common sense book of baby and child care by Dr. Benjamin Spock (1946)

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (1952)

The courage to be by Paul Tillich (1952)

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey (1962)

The politics of ecstasy by Timothy Leary (1968)

On death and dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1969)

The uses of enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)

POPULAR CULTURE AND MASS ENTERTAINMENT

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

The turn of the screw by Henry James (1898)

The hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

Tarzan of the apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

Riders of the purple sage by Zane Grey (1912)

The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie (1920)

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie (1936)

Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

The big sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)

The day of the locust by Nathanael West (1939)

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)

The cat in the hat by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) (1957)

Stranger in a strange land by Robert Heinlein (1961)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

In cold blood by Truman Capote (1965)

Ball four by Jim Bouton (1970)

Carrie by Stephen King (1974)

The bonfire of the vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)

WOMEN RISE

The age of innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)

Woman suffrage and politics by Carrie Chapman Catt (1923)

My fight for birth control by Margaret Sanger (1931)

Dust tracks on a road by Zora Neale Hurston (1942)

The second sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

The golden notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)

The feminine mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

Sisterhood is powerful edited by Robin Morgan (1970)

Against our will : men, women, and rape by Susan Brownmiller (1975)

The color purple by Alice Walker (1982)

ECONOMICS AND TECHNOLOGY

The theory of the leisure class by Thorstein Veblen (1899)

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism by Max Weber (1904)

The education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams (1907)

The general theory of employment, interest and money by John Maynard Keynes (1936)

The road to serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944)

A theory of the consumption function by Milton Friedman (1957)

The affluent society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)

The death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)

Superhighway – super hoax by Helen Leavitt (1970)

Small is beautiful : a study of economics as if people mattered by E.F. Schumacher (1973)

The whole Internet : user’s guide & catalog by Ed Krol (1992)

UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

The time machine by H.G. Wells (1895)

The Jewish state by Theodor Herzl (1896)

The wonderful wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1900)

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by James Matthew Barrie (1906)

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

Brave new world by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Lost horizon by James Hilton (1933)

Walden Two by B.F. Skinner (1948)

Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell (1949)

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)

A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

The handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

WAR, HOLOCAUST, TOTALITARIANISM

Armenian atrocities : the murder of a nation by Arnold Toynbee (1915)

Ten days that shook the world by John Reed (1919)

The war poems by Siegfried Sassoon (1919)

The good soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hasek (1920-1923)

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (1925)

All quiet on the western front by Erich Maria Remarque (1928)

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (1935-1940)

For whom the bell tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)

Darkness at noon by Arthur Koestler (1941)

Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946)

The diary of a young girl by Anne Frank (1947)

The gathering storm by Winston Churchill (1948)

Night by Elie Wiesel (1958)

Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong (1966)

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)

The Gulag archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(1973-1975)

Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)

Maus : a survivor’s tale by Art Spiegelman (1986-1991)

OPTIMISM, JOY, GENTILITY

The country of the pointed firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)

The story of my life by Helen Keller (1903)

The innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton (1911)

Platero and I : an Andalusian elegy by Juan Ramon Jimenez (1914)

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (1914)

Etiquette in society, in business, in politics, and at home by Emily Post (1922)

The inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1923)

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne (1926)

Shadows on the rock by Willa Cather (1931)

The joy of cooking by Irma Rombauer (1931)

The hobbit, or There and back again by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)

Goodnight moon by Margaret Wise Brown (1947)

To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

The best of simple by Langston Hughes (1961)

The complete poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1983)

FAVORITES OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

The tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter (1902)

A tree grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)

The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

Charlotte’s web by E.B. White (1952)

The snowy day by Ezra Jack Keats (1962)

Where the wild things are by Maurice Sendak (1963)

Sarah, plain and tall by Patricia MacLachlan (1985)

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